Monday, December 25, 2006

Here's a shot of me attempting to pass along the joyous Christmas tradition of "rich roll cookies" to my son Nicolas. I've made this recipe tons of times, and this year was the first time I royally screwed it up.

This experience demonstrates the perils of baking only once a year. I tracked down as many of my American measure measuring cups as I could find (most were in various toyboxes), but all of the labels had rubbed off saying which one was which. I thought I'd be able to figure out which was which just by eyeballing it "Is this a half-cup or a cup? Guess it looks like a cup..." and I was very, very wrong. And even though the dough had the wrong consistency as I put it in the fridge to chill, I still didn't realize how badly I'd messed up until I tried to roll out the dough and cut it and bake it. And all the little shapes (that had been so much trickier than usual to cut out) liquefied and ran together.

I went ahead and baked them all anyway, and the result was almost tolerably edible if I do say so myself!!!

I think a lot of culinary innovations are the result of "serendipity" (a.k.a. errors ;-) ), so I thought of patenting this new recipe and marketing it as "Little Baked Pats o' Butter," but then it hit me that I'm probably not the first to make this mistake, and really they weren't very good.

Anyway at least I felt festive in my red-and-green-plaid Christmas apron!!! And I'll do better next year.

If anyone has forgotten my position on the whole Christmas thing, here's the explanation: Tradition! :D

I just wanted to thank you for the wonderful Christmas present of your book. I'm about 80 pages in and it has been a fun, nostalgic trip so far. Couple that with hanging out with my very wonderful, TBM family and I feel all warm and traditional.

My trick for correcting any culinary mistakes on deserts is to add more sugar -- usually works, although I think I'm about to fall into a diabetic shock.

I think the botched cooking and baking attempts might be the best ones anyway. My kids don't remember the various times I've made perfectly edible, or even delicious meals and desserts. What they do remember are the vile biscuits I tried to make from scratch last year, or the incredibly botched meatloaf from five years ago. My sisters and I still joke about the time our mother burned the Kraft Mac & Cheese in 1982, and we all started singing "Somthing's Burnin" by Kenny Rogers. It's the mistakes that create memories.

The one tale that is always recounted (from my mom's years of thankless cooking dinner) was the time we grew some eggplant in our garden and Mom made an eggplant parmesan that the whole family hated!! ;-)